You may not have a secure data centre to put your drives in. You may not have the facility to back them up every night. The sort of people who use capabilities such as this have data which is worth enormously more than the cost of storing it.

Well, if my data was that precious there is NO WAY I'd rely on cloud storage!

Cloud storage is fine for things you want to be able to access easily form different computers/devices and also easy to update, but I would not keep anything important in the cloud that I didn't have elsewhere as well! Preferably stored in multiple ways (external hard drive(s), DVD:s...)

Well, if my data was that precious there is NO WAY I'd rely on cloud storage!

Cloud storage is fine for things you want to be able to access easily form different computers/devices and also easy to update, but I would not keep anything important in the cloud that I didn't have elsewhere as well! Preferably stored in multiple ways (external hard drive(s), DVD:s...)

Certainly it makes sense to have a redundant backup strategy. But cloud storage is big business in the commercial world. The company I work for (not Amazon) is investing serious money in selling secure cloud data storage to businesses.

Certainly it makes sense to have a redundant backup strategy. But cloud storage is big business in the commercial world. The company I work for (not Amazon) is investing serious money in selling secure cloud data storage to businesses.

I did not get the impression that Amazon was targeting businesses. I bought a 1 TB USb HDD the size of a pack of smokes. Not very difficult to take with me or even lock away (granted I don't have a fire proof safe or anything like that, then my data doesn't really have a commercial value).

My surprise comes from the difference in pricing. If Amazon wanted $100 for 1 TB I can see how some people might opt for an offfering like that, but $1,000?

Amazon and Apple's offerings are not meant primarily for backup. You can use them for backup, but the main purpose is to have documents and media that you can easily access from multiple computers/phones/tablets/etc. So the big draw is the syncing feature. It's unlikely that someone would have 1tb of information that they need to sync with all their devices.

I did not get the impression that Amazon was targeting businesses. I bought a 1 TB USb HDD the size of a pack of smokes. Not very difficult to take with me or even lock away (granted I don't have a fire proof safe or anything like that, then my data doesn't really have a commercial value).

My surprise comes from the difference in pricing. If Amazon wanted $100 for 1 TB I can see how some people might opt for an offfering like that, but $1,000?

For our cloud storage we pay close to $2 per GB. I don't know the details, but I think there's back ups at at least 2 different places, a guaranteed percentage of up-time and guaranteed minimum pipe-width in the Gb/s range.

Regardless, for someone relocating shortly, the easiest/cheapest solution is to take his 200 TB of data with him on HDs, leaving a backup behind.

Who has 200 TB of data?
Isn't that more than everything that has ever been written, recorded and photographed?
Don't even think CIA has 200 TB of data.

I was working recently on a project with the National Westminster bank, one of the largest UK banks. Their customer database is well over a Petabyte (1024TB) in size. 200TB would not be considered a particularly large database in modern terms. Many large organisations - banks, airlines, etc - will have databases that size.